


Raising Stakes: Director's Cut

by MaryPSue



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Author Commentary, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 12:49:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15819201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: Chapter-by-chapter author commentary onRaising Stakes, as requested byancientouroboros. This was originally posted to tumblr.





	Raising Stakes: Director's Cut

**Author's Note:**

> took me fucking long enough

> **[Raising Stakes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5271431)**  (76,466 words, published November 23, 2015, completed December 1, 2017)

First off, I have to acknowledge the now-orphaned [ **Cooperation is Mandatory**](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4964758) as a major inspiration for this fic. Also, a jokey post I saw somewhere on tumblr about a guy who got turned into a vampire and just...didn't notice. 

Cooperation is Mandatory presented a Ford who inadvertently hurt a creature!Stan and almost instantly realised he'd made a mistake, and they talked and started to resolve their differences and mend their relationship. It was an excellent premise and a very cool fic with a lot of great worldbuilding (though it now appears to have been abandoned and orphaned on AO3). But about halfway through rereading the first chapter (for...the third time), I thought, "what if Ford hadn't felt bad about it because he was so far gone in his paranoia that he refused to believe creature!Stan was still Stan at all', and things cascaded from there.

The jokey post presented a humourous scenario where a person adjusted their lifestyle around their vampirism without realising they had it. I realised that a lot of Vampire Stuff could easily be mistaken for the kind of lifestyle changes that would come with suddenly being homeless, and [made a post](https://marypsue.tumblr.com/post/133566474883/gravity-falls-au-where-stan-gets-turned-into-a) proposing a Stan-centric AU accordingly. I didn't have a good storyline for it, though, so I didn't go anywhere with it for quite a while. It eventually ended up becoming the flashback intros in what became Raising Stakes.

> **Chapter One**

There’s a lot of emphasis on what Stan’s thinking and feeling, and a lot of emphasis on the weather and the environment. This is, of course, partly because I was experimenting with the tone and the mood and trying to set them for the rest of the fic, and partly because I will never stop using the sympathetic fallacy to convey my characters’ emotions, but that’s not the only reason.

This chapter was written before I knew what direction this fic was going to take. I knew I wanted vampire Stan. I knew I wanted Ford to turn him away. I was pretty sure it had to have a happy ending (eventually). That was it. This is the secret reason why there is so much emphasis on the environment and Stan’s inner state in this chapter. I had no idea where I was going with it.

I debated with myself for a long while over "It didn't look like anyone lived there. It looked like maybe someone had died there." The first part was fine, but I had a vague inkling that I might want to turn Ford into a vampire at some point in this fic, and I wasn't sure if the bit about somebody dying in Ford's house would be too heavy-handed. As you can see by the finished product, however, my hands weigh a ton and I have no shame about this. Same goes for "Ford was too busy bringing wonderful things out of the realm of possibility and turning them into reality" - Stan's thinking about Actual Advances in the Field of Science, of course, but this also directly and ironically refers to Bill, as well as the 'half-truths and campfire stories' that Ford's in Gravity Falls to chase in the first place.

> "It's okay. He's family. [...] He won't bite."

I couldn't resist.

I actually made sure not to review AToTS before I wrote this chapter - I'm of the opinion that rewrites of canon scenes are more fun to read if they're completely rewritten, rather than keeping all the dialogue verbatim from canon, and one of the best ways to capture the gist of a canon scene while still making it new is to rewrite it completely from memory. I did go back to the transcripts to make sure I got this line right, though, because it was just too good of a joke that became even better when combined with vampire fic. Even when I'm doing my best to be ominous and melancholy and lush of prose, I'm a sucker for a shitty pun. I'd apologise but I'm definitely not sorry at all even a little bit.

I think I'd decided by "undead underworld shit" that I wanted to try to write this whole fic without using the word "vampire" once. I don't think I succeeded - I'm pretty sure Albert gets it in there in the SotBE's basement - but it was a fun challenge.

For the record, I was listening to Death Cab's  _Kintsugi_  (especially "No Room In Frame") and Half Moon Run's  _Dark Eyes_  while writing these first couple of chapters.

> **Chapter Two**

Chapter Two introduces the framing device of flashbacks to how Stan found out he was a vampire (which would eventually become flashbacks to how he ended up in Gravity Falls). It also introduces Susan.

I took a leaf out of Henry Selick's book with Susan. Neil Gaiman's  _Coraline_  has one, extremely solitary primary character, with the introduction of a cat who comes and goes about halfway through. The movie adaptation, however, introduces a second character, a neighbour Coraline's age called Wybie. When it first came out I was an asshole book purist and was really mad about it until one of my friends pointed out to me that 90% of the book is Coraline's internal monologue, and that if it had been adapted straight to film the way it was written, at least half the movie would just have been Coraline either wandering around alone or talking to herself. It wouldn't have worked on film without someone for her to talk to and bounce off of. (Also, Wybie turned out to be a complete delight and the way his character was used worked really well, and I was being a jerk about it for no good reason.) 

When it came to RS, I realised that if Ford turned Stan away at the threshold, Stan had nobody else in Gravity Falls who he knew, and wasn't likely to make friends under his own steam. It was going to be an extremely boring, depressing, and standard-woe-is-me-I-am-forced-to-suffer-this-solitary-unlife vampire angst fic, not to mention a complete dickfest, if I didn't introduce some other characters - and probably, I'd need characters who were too friendly for their own good and couldn't take a hint. So...Susan.

I didn’t, at this point, think the fic was going to end up taking the direction it ended up taking. I had a couple of scenes of Stan sleeping in his car and Susan finding him and trying to help him out, claiming that even if he couldn’t die again he could still freeze, and then of Stan having to save her from the wood giant that ate Ford's car. She'd then taken him out to the bar (and bought him a Bloody Mary, which he hadn't thought was very funny at all) and gotten righteously indignant at Ford on his behalf, which had so surprised Stan that he'd had to fake that he'd gotten a cold from the nights in his car because he definitely wasn't sniffling, and then...something something something happy ending. Originally, the Society of the Blind Eye wasn’t even in it. 

As you can see, that whole plan got scrapped very early on, mostly because it didn't have a future in it. It would've been cute, though. And a whole lot shorter.

In case my heavy-handed metaphors were just too subtle, Stan lining up the salt and pepper shakers (which always come in twos, ahahaha) and flicking the salt shaker off the counter to shatter was absolutely symbolic of his and Ford's relationship to that point. It is no coincidence at all that Susan enters immediately after Stan smashes the salt shaker.

I did, in fact, make up some horseshit to justify not having Stan wandering around sniffing the air all the time (which I figured would be too great a breach of character to accurately incorporate) and to avoid having to come up with a whole new set of olfactory experiences for the guy to have. It's...not entirely unfounded horseshit, the parts of the brain responsible for scent and for memory are very close together and so the two are linked. This absolutely does not mean that scent and 'hunches' are linked, though. Please don't run this fic by your local neuroscientist.

> **Chapter Three**

The vampires who tried to kill Stan, accidentally turning him, and then stole his car are absolutely meant to be the vampires from Joel Schumacher’s  _The Lost Boys_. I think it may be my favourite vampire film ever made, and the combination of humour and camp drama is perfect for vamp!Stan imo. (And since I’m the author, my opinion matters.)

Stan is very, very good at rationalising. So is Ford. I'm of the opinion that it was a survival mechanism for growing up in a house where 'love' was a four-letter word but displeasure was instantly made known. It does, however, mean that they're both also very good at interpreting and ascribing intent where there maybe was none, and very bad at giving the benefit of the doubt (which, I believe, is also a legacy from a childhood of bullying and is a major contributing factor in their inability to reconcile until a couple of kids with a way more straightforward interpretation of the world, and also extenuating circumstances, force them to sort their shit out).

> "And if there was one thing Ford wasn't, it was an idiot."

Stan thinks so highly of his brother, he really does.

I pulled out as many vampire superstitions as I could remember off the top of my head to protect Ford's house. (It's...a fair number. I have been something of a casual student of vampire lore for a looooonnnnng time now.) I like to picture him driving into town as soon as the sun rose and leaving with every book the library had that even mentioned vampires, a ten-pound sack of garlic, and several large cans of red paint. Actually, in this 'verse, Ford's probably been (entirely unintentionally) exposed to Anne Rice's novels. Ain't that a thing.

There's been much made in the vampire fandom and authorial community over the last hundred-odd years of the superstition that vampires are harmed or weakened by religious symbols and paraphernalia. I've seen a lot of authors come to the conclusion that any symbol of any religion can harm a vampire, so long as the wielder really believes in whatever the symbol stands for, but I don't think I've seen anyone else use the idea that any symbol of any religion can harm a vampire...so long as the  _vampire_  believes in whatever the symbol stands for. (Maybe Terry Pratchett, in  _Carpe Jugulum_? Though that's much less clean-cut than I've presented it as here...)

> "Coors", he said, at last.

I did the absolute bare minimum research necessary to make sure nothing obviously leapt out to scream 'this was written by someone who wasn't alive in the eighties!' Any time a brand name is mentioned, it's been meticulously researched (read: googled) to make sure it was around and popular enough to be in the vernacular in 1982. Mostly, though, I just made shit up and called it good. I apologise profusely to anybody who does actually remember the eighties.

The idea that Ford has been wiped from the town's collective memory is one I stole from a fic [phantomrose96](https://phantomrose96.tumblr.com) wrote pre-NWHS, where Stan came to town for Ford's funeral, only to discover nobody remembered who they were burying. It was very creepy and extremely well-done, and made a lot more sense to me than Ford just...never...interacting...with anyone in town.

> **Chapter Four**

I don't know how much of Stan's 'charm's' mechanics came through in the fic. Basically, if somebody's aware that he's using it on them, it won't work. This means it's easier to use on people who don't know about vampires, and the more Stan keeps his requests reasonable and in line with what the person might do anyway, the longer he can keep it going. So, he does still have to be persuasive and charming himself to get it to work as well as it does - other vampires probably also have this ability, but some of them are just so bad at talking to people that they can't get any meaningful use out of it.

This was about where I started developing Thistle and Carla's role in the RS-'verse. At this point, I didn't expect to bring Carla in as a character, just as a fun callback to canon. This was also about where I decided the Society of the Blind Eye was going to be my main antagonist for most of the rising action - partly because I'd set up Susan's easygoing attitude about the supernatural and they were the perfect opposition to that, but mostly because I'd realised that going with Bill showing his hand right out the gate was going to ruin the ~*sPo0ky*~ atmosphere I was going for, and also that I had no good ideas about what to do with him. I was also trying to sort out what the Society's role was in canon, because it wasn't quite adding up for me, so a lot of my headcanons ended up getting jammed into this fic.

I also hadn't decided, at this point, whether Bill was actually a demon like in canon or if he was a really ancient vampire. Part of why I ended up deciding against vampire!Bill was because it would have made the whole first part, where Ford didn't ward his house against vampires until Stan showed up and didn't immediately recognise Stan as one of the undead, into a super big plot hole, but also it was largely because I didn't want to have to give Bill a human (humanoid?) form that had fangs.

> **Chapter Five**

The Corduroys in this scene are, obviously, Manly ("Boyish" at this point) Dan, his brother, and his dad. There wasn't a real need within the fic to add a second Corduroy son. Sure, he makes a decent foil for Dan, but Dan's already doing that for their dad, and younger-Corduroy-kid really doesn't add anything to the conversion that couldn't already be accomplished with the two existing Corduroys. He's there 100% because he is a shoutout to [seiya234](https://seiya234.tumblr.com)'s Transcendence AU OC Henry, who is the son of Dan Corduroy's brother. I've got a whole complex headcanon history for Henry's dad because of this scene - he was Dan's younger, weaker brother, had a father who was obviously violent and strongly against the supernatural, and found his way in to his father's favour by being equally or more against anything 'weird' than his dad was. 

Also, Dan's brother turning hateful and vicious against Dan because he had been left out in the cold of their father's affections? Definitely seemed like a good foil for Stan. The guy never shows up again after this scene, though, so all that potential was wasted.

> **Chapter Six**

The flashback scene opening this chapter was originally a whole lot longer - Stan got on the phone with his ma, she recognised his voice but had to make out like he was just a client calling when Filbrick wanted to know what was up and gave Stan an actual tarot reading to keep up the illusion, and drew the Tower and then got very upset and cut off before she could get through her spiel about how it doesn't necessarily mean it literally, it can just mean a new phase in your life or the end of something that was important to you, but oh dear god Stanley, Stanley, it's your Dea-

It was melodrama. I cut it.

I also reworked this convo between Stan and Susan in the freezer more times than I'd care to admit. It was hard to get it feeling natural and conversational and not like an exposition dump, but still get the necessary information in there, without giving away too much.

I still had not decided, as of the crossbow ambush, to include Carla. I knew somebody was on the roof. I think I had a halfassed idea that it was some poor schmuck Bill was possessing. Carla the Vampire Slayer was still not even a twinkle in this story's eye. The crossbow was 100% a red herring to cast suspicion on Ford and give Stan reason to doubt him, but I never actually planned to make Ford the assassin. (Partly because it would have required him to leave his house.)

> **Chapter Seven**

It occurred to me about here that Susan should probably, pre-memory gun, have at least an inkling of a sense of self-preservation. Also that shit was kind of starting to hit the fan.

I've interpreted Susan backwards from canon working from Stan's comment about the people of Gravity Falls being the dumbest and the thought that prolonged memory gun use could damage the mind. Separating out what are basic personality traits and what are memory gun damage was an exercise in creative interpretation, although I had McGucket's before-and-after to work from. I decided that pre-memory-gun Susan is still friendly and determinedly positive and very bad at taking a hint, but much more fueled by righteous indignation and better at picking up on what's going on around her. This does not, however, make her any better at assessing potential risk to herself and making decisions based on that assessment.

> **Chapter Eight**

Flashback!Stan says 'ran away from home' rather than 'got kicked out' because, as previously mentioned, he is very good at rationalising. Also, he comes by it honestly. You can sure as shit bet Filbrick Pines didn't go around telling people that he threw his own son out of the house for good for breaking a science project. I'm of the opinion that, once he'd had a chance to cool off, he probably planned to let Stan come back home, with conditions, if Stan had made some impressive gesture of remorse - but, when Stan didn't, convinced himself that the boy had just run away instead of bothering to try and fix the mess he'd made, which was just typical of Stan anyway.

(As I may have mentioned, I'm not particularly impressed by Filbrick Pines.)

I based the description of how Stan's staking felt on the time I broke my wrist. 

The writing method I usually use is to start with a rough idea of how the story will go - a beginning, a few big setpieces in a rough order, and an ending - and then let what the characters do and feel fill in a lot of the middle parts. This has...meant that, historically, I've run up against a lot of writer's block in the 'middle parts'. One technique that's worked for me, that I really started to consciously apply in this fic, is to get my characters into trouble, and then see what they do to try to get out. Sometimes, this means fun stuff happens and the characters get to look like badasses. Sometimes, this means I realise I haven't put a nearly difficult enough challenge in front of them, and have to, pardon the pun, raise the stakes. Sometimes...sometimes, to borrow a metaphor that I would not have used at the time of writing, they roll a one. Sometimes one of those stakes goes clean through a character. It happens.

I did set Fiddleford's house on fire - and blow up a science experiment on the second floor - to give Susan and Stan a chance to get out of there, though, so please don't think I'm  _completely_  heartless.

I figure that, if vampires are dead bodies, and have no heartbeats, then the blood within them probably clots up, leaving them needing more fresh stuff. It's bullshit physiology, but it lets me give vampires cool gross gloopy black blood, so I don't actually care.

> **Chapter Nine**

I think I gave Stan three arms for a minute there in the flashback. Oops.

Poor Susan's world just got rocked on its axis, and no matter how positive she is, that was always going to take a toll on her. I really hope I did her justice here, because I also had to get her to exposition-dump about the Society of the Blind Eye at the same time.

Susan is of the opinion that revealing her personal stake in the mistreatment of the 'weird' in Gravity Falls will make Stan feel like she's only pretending to care about him to get what she wants, so she's kept it back. (Also, not her secret to share with a stranger willy-nilly.) Stan, on the other hand, has been sitting around worrying about what she's trying to get out of him, and finding out that she's just also trying to protect her family is probably the only thing that could have cemented his trust in her so immediately and strongly. They're best friends for life now.

I gave Susan's brother a stand-in name of 'Danny' here while I tried to decide what to call him, then posted the chapter, then forgot about the name I'd given the guy and named him again. I've since corrected that error (thanks to @ancientouroboros' sharp eyes), but sheesh. This is what beta readers are for. And yes, he absolutely is the werewolf mailman from Tourist Trapped.

Carla's crossbow pistol is 100% stolen from the dreadful Van Helsing movie that Hugh Jackman starred in. Never forget your roots, kids. Her calling Stan "twinkle-toes" is a callback to how he calls her "hotpants", and comes from the one thing I knew they did together, which was dancing.

> **Chapter Ten**

I wrote (and scrapped) an almost ungodly number of false starts to this chapter. Carla was too serious, too grimdark, too obsessed with how Stan had ~betrayed her, too ~damaged by her experiences with Thistle and his buddies. She had two emotions: Rage and Vengeance. It didn't fit the tone, it reduced her character to a flat, boring stereotype entirely defined by Bad Things Guys Have Done To Her, and it made it borderline impossible to get her onto Stan's side, which was the plan for the endgame. There was too much overwrought, overblown, melodramatic, poorly-handled angst tangled up with the character and the idea, I couldn't make it better, and I was starting to regret introducing her in the first place.

seiya234 actually saved Carla, by asking more questions about her as a character. I realised that the issue was that I hadn't given her any motivations or character beyond Stan and Thistle, gave her a flower shop, and suddenly everything started falling into place. I think she came out hurt but not obsessive, wary and a little hardened but not Gritty(TM), and she actually got to be funny, which was a huge relief to me. Moral of the story: your secondary characters always always  _always_  need something to care about that isn't directly related to the main character.

Also, she got the 'her aim's getting better' joke because I figure if she were actually going to date Stan, they'd need to share a sense of humour.

It was absolutely Bill-in-Ford's-body who called Carla to Gravity Falls, and trying to hint at that without giving the characters anything that would make them suspicious was a lot of fun.

> **Chapter Eleven**

The flashbacks in chapters Ten-Twelve were the most fun to write out of the entire fic. I love horror imagery.

And then, of course, we leap to Ford getting nailed in the ear with a snowball, because nothing says 'moody horror' like a quick cut to a dumb practical joke. Ah, mood whiplash. Where would I be without you. (Possibly published, but.)

That thing Ford says about Romanian vampire mythology? Real myth. Vampires in old Romanian lore target their own families as prey, probably because vampire myths were very closely tied with infectious disease outbreaks. It's some cool stuff if you ever feel like reading up on it.

Despite his protestations, Ford's absolutely thinking of Stan as his brother Stanley at the start of this conversation. I feel like that's a fairly accurate reflection of canon!Ford - he really  _wants_  to open up and trust and spend time with the people he loves, he doesn't  _want_  to be alone and isolated, but he doesn't feel he has any other choice.

I also think canon!Ford probably had a similar justification for their father's actions, though, up until he wiped his Stan's memory, he didn't see any disproportionate consequences happening to his Stan for what was actually a relatively minor transgression and a very bad way of dealing with it.

> "...drawn tight as a garrote wire..."

I initially had "as a violin string" here, but I changed it to a metaphor Stan might be more likely to use. I feel like using vocabulary and imagery that the character would use in third-person limited omniscient or first-person narration is just as important as doing so in dialogue. Narration can establish a character's voice and personality just as much as their dialogue, and if you've got a character who talks like they ain't got no schoolin' but your narration, which is supposedly happening in your character's head, is overflowing with grandiloquent, loquacious observations and metaphors involving advanced physics, you've either established your character as deceitful (or Fiddleford McGucket), or you've failed to establish them at all.

I also think canon!Ford cut off contact with his parents after he caught shit from Filbrick for chasing Bigfoot instead of racking up patents. I doubt Filbrick Pines would have understood or encouraged Ford's research, and, no matter how much rationalising Ford did, I doubt their relationship ever really recovered from Filbrick throwing Ford's twin and only friend to the curb. (This also would've made it much easier for canon!Stan when he stepped into Ford's shoes.)

> "Fine, I'll bite."

Dumb vampire puns, thy name is Mary.

> **Chapter Twelve**

The flashback here reveals what Susan saw in Stan's eyes that tipped her off to what he was - Stan, and all other vampires in the Raising Stakes-'verse, have a [tapetum lucidum](http://alithographica.tumblr.com/post/159086063171/science-fact-friday-tapetum-lucidum-so-why), which gives them better night vision but worse day vision. Vampire eyesight is probably generally improved over human eyesight, but the daytime disadvantage cancels it out enough that Stan probably still needs glasses in daylight.

I looked it up, and horror comics weren't really a Thing until the very late sixties/early seventies, so the tiny Stan twins probably wouldn't have read them. With that said, though, the timeline on Glass Shard Beach is so wonky, and they would have been so perfect for Stan, so I left the reference in.

When Stan threatens to burn the Journal, Ford nearly crosses the threshold to take it back, which is what convinces Ford that Stan did it on purpose to get Ford out of the Shack's protection and, because Ford is very paranoid and very, very sleep-deprived, that this is proof Stan really has been working for Bill all along. Everything Ford says and does from that moment on is under the assumption that Stan's taking the Journal straight back to Bill, and will use it to help Bill end the world.

Stan, of course, has no idea about any of this and has just hit his final limit.

The tree that takes the Stanleymobile out of commission was toppled, in initial drafts, by one of McGucket's killer robots. I took out the lines that made this obvious, partly because it broke up the flow of the scene and broke the tension, partly because I wasn't sure what the motivation would have been and didn't know if I could make it all hang together coherently.

> **Chapter Thirteen**

Stan's nostalgia for his 'old favourite treat' and the soda shop full of things he wants but can't have because he's undead was absolutely absolutely foreshadowing of how his relationship with Carla was about to go. Poor kid, he never stood a chance. Also, canon did some interesting things linking Carla to nostalgia, and I wanted to continue in that proud tradition.

Fiddleford is finally on the scene! I don't think I've ever written him in that in-between before Old Man McGucket but after he'd started losing grip anywhere else, and it was a lot of fun but also a challenge to balance well. Also, I don't think I gave him quite enough 'whatchamajigger'-style made-up words. He's casting around for anything to link one moment to the next, his brain working as hard as it can to preserve what's left of his identity, but I tried to write him very close to the edge.

It's also because he's close to the edge that he mistakes Stan for Ford - I don't think Stan has aged since he died, but Fiddleford erased enough of a chunk of his own memory of working with Ford that it's very likely, to my mind, that Fiddleford only remembers college!Ford's appearance anyway.

It's never stated, but is commonly accepted fanon, that the lumberjack ghost in Northwest Mansion Mystery is a Corduroy ancestor. I took that and extrapolated it - in a Gravity Falls where the Northwests stole labour from the Corduroys, but both families were founding members of a prestigious secret society, there'd be friendships among them, but also a deep and abiding rivalry.

I also took the idea that Blind Ivan might have been a Northwest from a post somewhere on tumblr that pointed out his facial similarities to Preston Northwest. I mean, he also looks like Handsome Squidward, but it was enough to work with for purposes of an AU.

[This](http://bogmud.tumblr.com/post/159577622556/fangtooth-moray-photos-by-sacha-lobenstein) is pretty much what I had in mind when I was thinking of Stan's fighting fangs.

Albert telling the whole world what's playing in Stan's head - that Stan's got no friends, that no one in the world would miss him - only to be interrupted by Susan, who, despite the fact that she is wildly unequipped to rescue Stan and knows she might be putting her life on the line for a guy who's been using her, has come to save him anyway - is one of my favourite parts of the fic. I'm sure that, even though Stan makes a fuss about it, he's unspeakably grateful to her for coming after him, even if the 'rescue' part didn't exactly work out.

> **Chapter Fourteen**

Flashback!Stan lists a whole bunch of reasons why he has to stay away from Carla, but he leaves out one very important one - vampires are dead. They have no blood flow. This, as you may surmise, has certain knock-on effects that might make maintaining an intimate relationship...difficult.

Susan is so unimpressed by Stan's vampirism and it delights me.

Ford thought Susan was possessed when she came to his door to ask about Stan, if that wasn't clear. I was hoping that having him ask her about the book there would indicate why he'd turned on Stan in their conversation.

I had an entire backstory between Susan and Ivan and Albert Corduroy from when they were kids - it involved Susan earning the nickname "Black-Eye Susan" - but all that made it into the fic itself was Susan knowing about Ivan's interest in prestidigitation. Maybe one day.

> **Chapter Fifteen**

I deliberately used language to describe Carla’s expressions in the flashback - “unimpressed”, “disappointed” - to call back to the language Filbrick uses to talk about his sons (”I’m not impressed”) and link this scene of Stan being kicked out of Carla’s house to Stan being kicked out of his childhood home. Stan asking Carla if she’s really happier without him is just as much Stan metaphorically asking Ford if he’s really happier without him. Makes him driving Thistle’s van off a cliff about something a little more than “just” fighting over a girl.

I’m of the impression that Thistle is an old and powerful enough vampire that he thinks of humans as sort of...domestic animals. Some of them are livestock, some of them are pets, but all deserve a quality of life and care that Stan wasn’t putting into his. Stan was mistreating his pet, so Stan didn’t deserve to have her anymore. On the one hand, it was intended to be a benevolent kind of brainwashing; on the other hand, still brainwashing. 

Aha! I knew Albert snuck The V Word in during this scene somewhere. So close.

Stan’s inability to talk properly around his fangs was just too hilarious to me, so naturally I had to use it at every opportunity.

> **Chapter Sixteen**

I know PTSD flashbacks don’t work like this. Well. I know that  _now_. 

Sarcasm does not come easily to Susan, but it’s been an extremely long night.

I think I had Ford give Stan Journal 3, instead of Journal 1 like in canon. The reasoning for this was entirely that I needed Stan to find out some more information about Bill, and there was basically no one else who could tell him other than Ford himself. And Ford wasn’t talking, so I needed his writing to do the talking. 

Fiddleford swings wildly back to ‘researcher on the brink of madness’ here, and I think I was trying to signal that, when he still remembered about Ford and building the memory gun and what had prompted it, he was still achingly close to sanity - but also, every time he got that close, he was wiping out enough memories to send him careening into giant-murderbot territory. I’m not sure that this was explored with enough depth and sensitivity to not just look like wildly inconsistent characterisation, though.

> **Chapter Seventeen**

> _This was just Stan Pines. Naive, helpless, baby-faced Stan Pines. Harmless._

People underestimating Stan - to their own detriment - is one of my favourite things and I could write about it forever. Also, more fuel to the ‘Stan didn’t physically age past eighteen’ fire.

I decided to name the werewolf mailman Eustace, to go with Susan, as a winking Chronicles of Narnia reference. I forgot that I had already named him earlier in the fic. Whoops. 

Since I gave Ivan a somewhat shameful backstory to his tattoos and a connection to the notoriously proud Northwest family, I’m assuming he wouldn’t go out in public looking like the love child of a cenobite and Handsome Squidward. Guy’s definitely got a wig, and probably a ton of makeup and some dark glasses to boot. It’s kind of pointless, since basically everyone in town knows about the Society of the Blind Eye and thus about his tattoos, but vanity knows no reason.

Susan’s idea about the threshold was my original plan for the endgame - Susan was going to get inside, and then offer to give Stan a tour in exchange for a quarter, which would make the building officially a public place and negate the threshold. It also would’ve been a cute callback to the Mystery Shack. I ended up not having a good place to put it, what with everything else happening, and also realised that Fiddleford had lived at the Shack for a while and could probably give Stan an invitation, so I didn’t even need it. 

> “I’ll be fine. I got...a plan.”

This, as you may have guessed, is a blatant lie.

I lifted Carla’s “concerned citizen” line from a Terry Pratchett book -  _The Truth_ , I think? The phrasing is obviously not exact, since it went in from memory, but it was Sir Terry’s observation first and credit should be given where credit is due.

> **Chapter Eighteen**

Susan getting sweeter and sweeter the angrier she gets is maybe not exactly true to canon, but it is, I think, very funny. The coffee omelette being a nasty prank also makes more sense than a pre-memory-gun Susan thinking it’s a genuinely good idea and also was very funny, though I’d say that pre-memory-gun Susan is still a terrible cook. 

Carla’s had a lot of experience with vampires who have tried to manipulate her, partly because this is all setting her up to be able to sympathize with Ford and to want to help save him from Bill, partly because people were leaving comments about how unreasonable and mean she was being. Seriously, I didn’t think she came across as being unreasonable and mean? She was brainwashed and kidnapped by a vampire and kept by him for years. I’ve already established that other vampires eat humans with no regard for the humans’ lives (c.f. the ones who turned Stan). She responded to a call from someone she knew and trusted asking for her help getting rid of a vampire who’s been terrorizing him. As far as she knows, she’s the good guy here, and she’s still clearly torn up about what she feels she has to do to Stan. I don’t get it.

To be fair, however, she  _is_  a terrible speed demon. 

> **Chapter Nineteen**

Carla is also  _really_  not into anything that messes with people’s minds. 

I really, really hope I got some accurate terminology on all Stan’s punches here. What’s a rabbit punch? Gee, I’m not sure, but I think you can do it to the side of someone’s head!

Stan’s fighting fangs can shred the inside of his own mouth. That’s a terrible design flaw in a creature, but given that there are, in the world, warthogs whose tusks grow up through the skin of their own snout, and that ‘flesh pockets’ is a perfectly acceptable biological solution for Really Fuckoff Big Fangs, I’m gonna say that RS-’verse vampires with their mouthful of retractable needles are actually doing pretty good, all things considered.

One of my least favourite things about action movies, and spy movies, and procedurals, and just about any kind of visual media where people have guns, is that inevitably, there will be a scene where the Hero has a gun trained on the Villain. And the Villain, in all their smug, villainous glory, will chuckle to themselves, and tell the Hero, “You won’t do it. You’re too good. If you killed me, you’d be just like me/you’ll never get the answers you want/etc./etc.”. And the Hero  _realises the Villain is right_ , and puts the gun down, and walks away, like an  _asshole_. There are so many places to shoot somebody that won’t kill them! There are so many levels between “let the Villain get off scot-free” and “murder the Villain with extreme prejudice”! And everything always frames it as an absolute, all-or-nothing choice! I mean, yes, all of those levels are going to have their own consequences, some of which the Hero (or the author) may not be prepared to deal with, but...they’re there! They’re options!

Jupiter Ascending dealt with this in a way I really appreciated, by having the Villain say “you won’t do it” and the Hero almost  _instantaneously_  shoot him right in the goddamn dick. Carla, here, is of a similar (though slightly more Y-7 rated) mindset.

Stan attacking Ivan is probably the most vampire-story-cliche that RS gets. I hope.

> Stan had noticed it the first time he’d walked around it, but - the place seemed to have too many sides, too many corners, too many angles. Walking around it, you felt like you’d been walking for too long, taken too many turnings. 

The Shack is Of Leaves because of the discussion that went on on tumblr trying to sort out its floor plan and where, exactly, everything was. I’m of the considered opinion that it’s both more fun and funnier to treat the Shack as though it’s  _canonically_  confusing, terrifying, and non-Euclidean, and has a tendency to sprout rooms as they are required. 

> **Chapter Twenty**

Flashback! I don’t know how much of this came across, but Rico figured out that Stan wasn’t human when Stan tried to put a whammy on him, and sold him into a supernatural dogfighting ring instead of smuggling him out of the country like he’d asked. At least now Stan and Rico are square...

Stan trying to sell Bill on taking his body is one of the most horrible things I’ve ever written and I knew it had to be part of this fic. I didn’t know what Stan was going to do after this, I didn’t know what he was hoping to accomplish by doing this, I wasn’t sure how it was all going to work out in the end, heck, I didn’t even know if Ford was going through the portal or not, but by god, I was going to have Stan swindle his little heart out to save Ford.

Coming up for (literally) cartoonishly evil similes for what Bill made Ford look like was a fricking blast and I need to write Bill possessing people more often. 

> **Chapter Twenty-One**

Flashback!Stan has a huge, throbbing...crush on Jimmy Snakes that he will never, at least in this fic, admit out loud. I’m generally treating bi!Stan like it’s just canon these days, but I’m always torn between “mullet!Stan will retain a sliver of hope that he can someday get back in his family’s good graces, and part of that includes clinging to the hangups Filbrick Pines gave him about masculinity and sexuality” and “mullet!Stan, out of the house at last, indulges every fantasy he’s ever had about other men because what the fuck, it’s not like he’s gonna get any  _more_  kicked out than he already is, right?” In this case, I erred on the side of hangups. Next time, I’m gonna just make the damn thing canon in the text like I’m forever asking other storytellers to do. 

I know generally accepted fanon is that Jimmy was an abusive boyfriend, but Stan had suffered enough by this point in Raising Stakes (and things were bad enough that another bad thing would have pushed it all over the edge into melodrama), and I wanted to give him at least one more person to be in his corner, especially at a time in his life when he didn’t have anybody else. So, I wrote this Jimmy with the idea in mind that he was genuinely a nice guy who actually likes Stan. (Also, Stan’s crush is 100% reciprocated.)

He is, however, under the impression that Stan, being a baby-faced immortal, is some hundreds of years old and has been on the supernatural dogfighting circuit for some time. And also that there’s no way out except to wait until something happens to the people running it, and they’ve got all the time in the world, so they might as well just keep themselves alive and wait until it all works itself out. I’ve got a note here that I’m pretty sure is a line of Jimmy dialogue that didn’t make it into a flashback scene that just says “Hey, it’s not so bad, at least there’s always a roof over our heads and we get fed here, right?” I’m starting to suspect that this version of Jimmy also knows what it’s like to be homeless.

In an earlier draft, before I realised how close I was to finished and that I would need one more flashback, Jimmy and Stan’s conversation led into Stan revealing he still had a living brother, Jimmy asking more questions about that and finding out just how young Stan actually was, and that being the thing that made him decide that they needed to break out. They set the complex where they were being kept on fire, and escaped in the chaos. It was getting monstrously overlong for a flashback intro, though, and I couldn’t make it flow naturally, so it all got cut down.

I had Bill rip into Ford’s throat, and then realised I had no idea how Stan would be able to save Ford and destroy the portal once Stan had given up his body. I remembered the skeleton, and then realised that I had no way to get the skeleton into the basement without Bill noticing and destroying it. It took some quick and extremely scrambling thinking, a few weeks of not touching the thing, and then someone else reminding me that there was a crash test dummy in the portal room  I don’t remember, now, who that wonderful person was, but they definitely saved my butt. 

In my notes for this chapter, I have one post-it that just says, in all caps, in very big letters in my best approximation of the It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia title cards font, “Stan Pulls a Magnus”. I had planned for, at one point, crash-test-dummy!Stan to get his arm ripped off in an extremely subtle and clever shoutout to TAZ: Balance, but then I got rolling on the fight scene and forgot about it. As of right now, I don’t actually remember if it made it into the published fic or not.

I also have a note here that just has a snippet of dialogue that did not make it into the fic but which is solid gold:

> Susan blinked. “... _Stan_?”
> 
> “In the flesh!” Stan looked down at the clattering bones that were serving as his body. “Or, uh, not.”

I also ran through at least four different possible scenarios for how artificial bodies and the portal could fit into this scene, and looking at them now, I can see that elements from all of them ended up in the final draft of the ending. It’s interesting, because at first glance I thought three of them had been scrapped altogether, but as I was listing them out here, I realised that at least one part of each of them had ended up getting used. 

Stan was absolutely relying on Ford to follow through on his promise and stake Stan’s body as soon as Ford was back in his own. It would’ve been a good plan, if Ford were actually as callous and capable of putting the greater good above his personal desires as he likes to pretend. 

> “Eeth! How doeth he talk with thethe thingth?” 

I deliberately didn’t let Bill figure out how to retract Stan’s fangs because him talking with that horrible nasal voice  _and_  a lisp  _and_  still being genuinely menacing was just too funny and good for me to pass up. 

I also believe that Bill can do things with Stan’s body that Stan will only be able to do after a couple hundred years, or will never be able to do at all, simply because Stan was human once and still has that little sliver of human self-preservation instinct at the back of his mind that says  _if we do that, we will die_. Bill was never human, and has no such qualms. 

This is part of why Bill being in Stan’s body makes Stan’s body seem so much more monstrous, and that was deliberate. Ford’s been telling himself all along that Stan’s a monster, but here, he’s confronted with evidence of just how relatively  _non_ -monstrous Stan is, of just how monstrous Stan could have been and had chosen not to. That’s part of why he takes a sudden left turn into trusting Stan, imo.

> **Chapter Twenty-Two**

> “Yep, you’re Stan,” Susan said, decisively. “Why’re you a dummy?”
> 
> “Believe me, I’ve been asking myself the same question for the last thirtyish years,” Stan muttered.

I just want us all to take a moment and appreciate this joke what I made.

Up until about halfway through this chapter, I still was not sure how this fic was going to end. I was starting to get the idea that I didn’t want Ford to go through the portal -  after everything that had happened, just when the boys were starting to understand each other and make some headway on being able to talk to each other, it would’ve felt like a cheat. I knew that I wanted everybody to be involved, everyone who’d been on Stan’s side to come to his aid and show him he wasn’t as alone as he’d thought. I had a vague plan to use the sigil on the side of the portal console to get Bill out of Stan’s body, and an even vaguer plan that Bill might then use the vessel Stan abandoned to turn on the portal. I had no idea how Carla and/or Fiddleford would fit into the picture, or what Susan could do that would help save the day and be within her established abilities. 

I’d previously planned that the Society of the Blind Eye would interrupt Stan immediately outside Ford’s cabin, that Carla would show up, that Stan would take out Ivan by erasing his identity completely and then turn the gun on Carla, threatening to do the same to her if she didn’t leave. He wouldn’t have done it - it was a complete bluff - but he knew how much she cared about the integrity of her mind, and knew that that might be the one thing that would get her to back off, even if it meant she’d never trust him again and spend the rest of her life hating him, it was worth it to save Ford. But that...didn’t fit at all with the storyline I had going, and also was tonally inconsistent and just generally a bummer. It fit better with the Rage and Vengeance Carla I’d initially started with, before I’d gotten good advice that helped make her into a fully rounded character, so it got scrapped. 

(I’d also, briefly, planned that Susan and Stan would have a chance to see each other again and to exchange reassurances - and goodbyes - before Stan went in after Bord, but as it shook out, Susan had to be in the Shack before Stan got there. That was kind of a shame, as it meant I had to cut the excellent exchange I had planned where Susan asked if she could give Stan a kiss before he went because she might never get another chance to kiss a vampire, Stan obliged, and Susan macked on him for like half a second before withdrawing with an “Ugh! Your mouth tastes awful, it tastes like something died...in...” 

Since I never planned to write them as anything but friends, it’s probably for the best that that exchange didn’t make it into the final product, but man would it have been funny.)

Susan’s casual dismissal of Stan’s self-sacrifice plan is my favourite. Susan is my favourite. I need to write more fics set in 1982 Gravity Falls just so I can include Susan. I love her.

Also, I realised in about this chapter that the only time Ford has ever met Susan is in the context of him believing that she’d possessed by Bill coming to get him. So, yeah, it wasn’t Bill who tied her up and tossed her in the basement. Ford is going to have some serious apologising to do the next time he wants diner waffles.

> “Oh, come on, Fordthy! You’re not giving up on me yet! Where’th your fighting thpirit?” Bill grinned expectantly, then threw Stan’s head back and cackled. “Oh, right! He wath in that thkeleton I thmathed!” 

Have I mentioned lately that I really, really love writing Bill’s dialogue? Because I really, really love writing Bill’s dialogue.

Aha! I  _did_ rip dummy!Stan’s arm off!

Somebody mentioned in the comments that this could become The Adventures of Portal!Carla and that’s not related to anything about this at all, I just think it’d be amazing.

> **Chapter Twenty-Three**

_HAHAHA YOU THOUGHT I’D ACTUALLY KILL FORD_

This was, by the way, absolutely Bill’s plan all along - have his cake and eat it too, genius nerd brain and indestructible undead body. 

> “Stan!” Carla shouted, gripping her crossbow pistol in both hands, jabbing it in Stan’s direction. “Out of the way, you’re blocking my shot!” 

This, also, was intentional. Carla’s got very few qualms about staking vampires, even ones who’re also people she used to know. Stan, on the other hand, is going to save his idiot genius brother, no matter what it takes. Oh, he might claim that he thinks Bill killed Ford and took his body, but Stan believes that about as much as Ford really believed Stan was dead and not Stan anymore. 

I set it up this way, so that Stan has to confront Bill in Ford’s body and decide whether to believe Ford’s still around or not, because my favourite thing about the way the finale of Gravity Falls resolved the conflict between Stan and Ford was that it put them both in a position where they were forced to consider the other’s priorities and see from the other’s perspective. Ford’s a vampire now, so that’s him covered off; I just needed to put Stan in Ford’s shoes, and this was how. 

It was about when Stan hit the concrete with Bill on his back that I realised I had made it to the end of my outline, and I really needed to sort out my ending, but fast. I’d found meaningful roles for Carla and for Fiddleford to contribute, but I still didn’t have anything amazing for Susan to do that would demonstrate how important her friendship was without having her have to suddenly take an unbelievable level in badass. I didn’t know how I was getting rid of Bill - I had an inkling that he could get tossed back through the portal in the dummy body, but no idea of how to get him back in the dummy body. I didn’t  _want_  Ford to go through the portal, and I didn’t want Stan to either, but I wasn’t sure I could wrap the thing satisfactorily with both their feet on the ground. 

That is when [scribefindegil](https://scribefindegil.tumblr.com) posted something about ring composition and I realised that I had everything I needed for the satisfying ending I was looking for, right there in the story. Stan had to beat Bill, that much I could take from canon. Then I needed to strip away everyone else. I needed it to end like it started, with Stan, Ford, and a threshold. 

After that, everything fell into place.

The language that’s used in the ending is deliberately chosen to reflect the beginning, and show how Stan and Ford’s relationship has changed. That’s why you get “...he reached out across the threshold of the portal...” and “ ‘I am your brother,’  he managed...” which is a direct quote from the first chapter, just before Ford uses the threshold to throw Stan out. Here, though, Ford gives Stan a big hug, which is another thing I stole from canon because I love it - using hugs to symbolise the mending and strengthening of relationships. It’s also the opposite of the first chapter - there, Ford was using the threshold to keep Stan away from him; here, Ford’s prepared to follow Stan over the threshold, prepared to be thrown out into the unknown along with Stan, which also mends the ten-year-old hurt between them (Ford turning his back when Stan was thrown out into the unknown).

I’m just working with what canon gave us, here. Gravity Falls set up an astonishingly good set of parallels between these characters and did such a good job with its character arcs and do you ever just cry because something is written so good and you are so glad and lucky to be alive at the same time as it exists

> **Chapter Twenty-Four**

And, at last, we come to the end.

I opened and closed this chapter with a flashback, to bring the whole thing full circle to when Stan drove into Gravity Falls at the beginning of the story. 

Ford’s undeath cure is literally just the zombie cure from Scary-oke. I saw no reason it shouldn’t also work on vampires.

I tried to get everybody into as good a position to make up and understand each other going forward as I could, but - there were a lot of interpersonal issues there, given the number of characters and what they meant to each other, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to devote the time and wordcount that each deserved in order to get to the root of their issues and put them to bed. I hope that where I left off was on a satisfactory enough note that nobody left feeling like there were still things that needed to be addressed. 

Stan and Ford, I thought, specifically needed to sit down and  _talk their shit out_. The undeath cure was partly because I actually didn’t think Ford would  _not_  use it if he had a chance to, but also partly so Ford had an excuse to say something thoughtless that would make Stan think he wasn’t wanted and push them from awkward avoidance of each other and dancing around their issues until Stan took off in the middle of the morning, into actually confronting each of their unspoken assumptions and starting to work on getting along with each other again. 

As I’ve said before, it’s in your hands now whether the cure works for Ford, whether it works for Stan, whether vamp!Stan and human!Ford have to go on a boat trip around the world seeking a cure for Stan’s vampirism or an elixir of youth that will keep Ford around Stan’s age perpetually so that Stan doesn’t have to be alone to face eternity. It’s in your hands whether a sequel featuring Carla and Jimmy and Carla’s flower shop’s next-door-neighbour, a heavily tanned and tattooed-eyebrowed bottle blonde named Darlene and her hair salon, solving a vampire-related mystery in California ever takes place. It’s in your hands whether Stan gets to mess with Dipper for an entire summer while Mabel knows all along that her grunkle’s definitely the undead. 

But whatever happens to the Stans from here on out, I would like to think that they face it together. 

 

Oh, and  **Bonus:**

In RS-’verse, the ‘Marilyn’ Stan married for all of eight hours was a Marilyn Monroe impersonator Stan met in Vegas who turned out to be the real, vampiric deal. She was being investigated by the FBI for a Vegas-marriage scam she and Vampire Audrey Hepburn were running where the husbands kept turning up mysteriously exsanguinated after signing new wills leaving her everything, and Stan was a poor schmuck she married to get them off her tail. Stan still has a napkin she autographed for him. 


End file.
